MONACO

Monte Carlo makes you sigh. If you are lover of the ornate, solid, overblown past of the Grand Hotels, the days of the ballerinas and Russian princes, you sigh because their time is so clearly over. If you are one of those idealists who has hopes for a reasonable and well-planned future, you sigh at the insensate piling up of steel, concrete and glass which has been inflicted on the Principality of Monaco by the corporations from all over the world that have been attracted there by its obliging tax structure. It is urbanism with a goiter, architecture by megalomaniacs, and soon a tree there will be a curiosity, a lawn a cause for wonder. In a few years perhaps only money will grow in the gardens and only stock-manipulators will be permitted past the frontier.

Still, the beach at the Sporting is handsomely conceived, with long lines of cabanas facing the sea on concrete walks. There are two large pools and a restaurant and the tennis club hanging on a cliff above as a background, and waiters in white coats carrying trays of cold langouste to the parties lunching outside the cabanas, in between games of gin rummy and bridge. It is all very much like a camp for condemned millionaires, given a touch of humanity by children diving off the boards and plump brown girls in bare feet playing volleyball on teams composed mostly of young men who, you are sure, have never worked a day in their lives.

We sailed out of Monte Carlo at midnight. It was clear and calm. A million pinpoints of light glittering in the charitable darkness transformed the garish principality into insubstantial electric lace.

We passed the Casino and I imagined what it was like at that hour around the tables. I used to patronize casinos and play chemin-de-fer. I didn’t lose much and sometimes I even won, but after several summers, the faces of the other players began to bother me. The distortions which greed, disguised or undisguised, caused on otherwise perfectly acceptable and everyday faces disturbed me. The real reason it disturbed me was that I began to see that no one was immune to it. By the simplest process of reasoning I came to the conclusion that my face hanging over the table must affect the others as their faces affected me. So I now avoid casinos. A writer’s life is such a gamble, anyway, that the itch to bet should be more than satisfied every time he sits down at the typewriter in the morning or receives a letter from his publisher.

Edified by this recollection of years of abstention from vice, I watched the lights of the last corner of France fall behind us as we set our course across the Gulf of Genoa toward the Ligurian coast. When we went down into our cabin and climbed into our bunks the noise of the screw and engines was steady and throbbing and gave us a brave illusion that we were cutting through the water at great speed. Sleeping at sea, with the cradling motion of the ship and the hypnotic rush of water past the portholes, brings an atavistic refreshment to an act that for modern man has become complicated and often frightening. The certainty that no phone can ring, no telegram can be delivered, serves as a sleeping potion, and the knowledge that next morning you are going to wake with the coast of Italy in view puts a smile on your dreams.